William Marvel: Microliving

“Little” was my stepdaughter’s eternal preference in any subject or object. When she herself was small, big things seemed to frighten her — such as the apparent infinity of space, which she would not allow anyone to talk about around her. She liked little figurines, and doll-sized chinaware. Small notebooks and fine-line pens appealed to her. She wrote (or rather printed) in neat and tiny letters. As she approached and entered her teens, she demonstrated a remarkable facility for drawing thumbnail sketches that I always wished she had cultivated, but they stayed in her pocket-sized notebook. Her affinity for tiny things prompted one of her early teachers to suggest, in ridiculous reflection of the educational mania of the day, that she must be suffering from low self-esteem.

She was not yet 11 when I built an 8-foot-by-10-foot shed to house the four family bicycles and all the skis and snowshoes. During much of the construction she hung out nearby, watching me work and asking questions while sizing up some of my scrap lumber for potential projects. I stayed home to apply siding to the shed one day while she made a trip to town with her mother, to whom she remarked that the new building was plenty big enough for her to live in. “I’ve been doing some measuring,” she said.